Reviews of Recent Museum and Gallery Shows
Amant, Brooklyn, NY September 15, 2022–March 5, 2023 by Farren Fei Yuan The exhibition SIREN (some poetics) that was unveiled this fall at Amant in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn offers an evocative experience that dissolves the boundaries in sensory perception and artistic media. As such, it posits an alternative to the proliferation of Instagram-ready exhibitions that […]
Museum of Modern Art, New York October 30, 2022–March 4, 2023 by Katherine Gregory Upon hearing the name Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985, Germany), any person who has taken an introductory art history course will picture her fur-covered cup Le Déjuner en Fourrure (1936) (fig. 1). This sculpture has come to stand for Oppenheim’s entire oeuvre and, […]
The Shed, New York, NY February 11–April 17, 2022 by Sarah-Rose Hansen Over the course of the eight galleries in Tomás Saraceno’s Particular Matter(s) exhibition, which was on view through mid-April at The Shed in midtown Manhattan, three separate moments introduce lighting shifts that are likely to cause the viewer to pause for pupillary adaptation. […]
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA March 4–July 31, 2022 by Renée Brown In 1964 German artist Anneliese Hager (1904–1997) published a book of her poems and photograms entitled Weiße Schatten (White Shadows). Released in an edition of fifty-five, each volume has a unique cover featuring a full-bleed photogram by Hager (fig. 1). The layered black […]
MASS MoCA April 4, 2021–September 5, 2022 by Max Gruber Viewers were led by gallery attendants into a vast hall shrouded in darkness. A grave silence coated the space, broken only by anticipatory coughing, shuffling, and the knowledge that the resonant sound of Glenn Kaino’s installation was about to begin. Short, brilliant infusions of light […]
Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, ON September 4, 2021—June 12, 2022 by Hailey Chomos In March 2020, the COVID-19 virus spread like wildfire. We retreated into our homes for what was promised to be a few weeks of lockdown; it was our duty to stay home in order to protect ourselves and others. More than […]
ICA Watershed, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston July 3—September 6, 2021 by Colleen Foran Since 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston (ICA) has annually commissioned a site-specific installation for the Watershed, its outpost in East Boston.1 This year’s exhibition highlighted the work of Dominican-American artist Firelei Báez (b. 1981). Báez’s family had roots […]
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH November 1, 2020–March 14, 2021 by Diane Dias De Fazio Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art connected canonical works from western and central Africa to works from contemporary artists active in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Mozambique, whose use of repurposed materials echoes practices of the past.1 […]
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA October 18, 2020–July 25, 2021 by Marina Wells The sounds of Billie Holiday, Beastie Boys, and The Clash bumped pleasantly in the background of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston’s exhibition Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, curated by Liz Munsell and Greg Tate. Though the […]
Pablo’s Birthday, New York September 17–October 25, 2020 by J. English Cook In his elegiac ruminations in The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard describes the intimate, sensuous associations that we often apply to the notion of home. Unexpectedly, his prose foreshadowed the confrontations between emotional and architectural interiority in our contemporary pandemic times. “Memories […]